Turning a fragmented licensing ecosystem into one connected experience.

Overview

Redesigning more than an interface.

Nuix’s licensing experience had evolved across several systems and processes. Customers found it difficult to manage their licences, internal teams needed to move between different applications to complete licensing tasks, and Nuix had limited visibility into licence usage across customers. The goal was to create a dedicated licensing platform that could bring the information and workflows needed to manage the licence lifecycle into one connected experience. At the same time, Nuix Workstation was moving towards the new licensing infrastructure, which meant the project also needed to consider what happened when licences were acquired, consumed, expired or became unavailable while someone was using the product. My involvement covered the full product lifecycle apart from development: understanding the existing ecosystem, helping define requirements, designing workflows and interfaces, validating solutions and working with the development team through implementation.

The Problem

Licensing had become fragmented across systems, users and rules.

There wasn’t one simple licensing problem. Several issues were interconnected. For customers, managing licences was difficult and often depended on Nuix staff. For internal teams, licensing information and activities were distributed across several applications. For the business, Nuix needed better visibility into customer licence usage. Underneath those experiences was a complex licensing model involving organisations, users, permissions, products, entitlements, licence pools, allocations and different licence conditions.

Discovery

Understanding how licensing actually worked.

There wasn’t a single source that explained the entire licensing experience. I started by studying the existing applications and processes and speaking extensively with Nuix employees who worked with licensing day to day. I worked closely with the Product Manager, Product Owner and Lead Developer, who was already investigating the technical direction for the new licensing platform. These conversations helped me understand both the operational pain points and the technical rules behind the system. The discovery work highlighted several recurring problems.

Defining requirements as understanding developed.

Rather than receiving a fixed set of requirements and designing against them, I worked alongside Product and Engineering to help define the requirements as our understanding of the system developed.

System Mapping

If the team couldn’t understand the system, designing it would be difficult.

As discovery progressed, another problem became apparent. The licensing rules were difficult for developers and stakeholders themselves to understand. Knowledge was spread across systems, conversations and individual team members, and this became particularly challenging when someone new joined the project. I needed a way to see the whole ecosystem at once. So I created a visual model documenting how the major parts of the proposed licensing platform connected. It also distinguished between the needs and capabilities of internal Nuix users and external customers. The artefact became more than a design deliverable. It gave Product, Design and Engineering a shared representation of the system they were building.

Behaviour & Edge Cases

The happy path wasn’t enough.

Understanding the information architecture was only one part of the problem. Licensing also affected what happened while people were actively using Nuix Workstation. I mapped the relationship between Workstation and the new licensing service, including scenarios where a licence changed state. The workflow also considered online, offline and semi-offline behaviour and what should happen to processes such as evidence ingestion when licence conditions changed. The purpose wasn’t simply to produce a flowchart. It allowed the team to reason about system behaviour before those situations became implementation problems.

Designing the Experience

Turning the system model into a manageable product.

Once the ecosystem and requirements became clearer, I translated them into the structure and workflows for the new licensing platform. The solution brought previously fragmented areas into a connected system covering:

Validation & Iteration

Designing with the people who understood the complexity.

Because the product depended heavily on specialist business knowledge, validation was continuous rather than something left until the end. I reviewed workflows and prototypes with internal Nuix users and stakeholders, worked with the Product Manager and Product Owner to refine requirements, and collaborated closely with the Lead Developer and development team to check technical feasibility. Usability testing and prototype walkthroughs helped refine the experience before and during implementation. This created a feedback loop between: Business knowledge → Requirements → Design → Technical feasibility → Feedback → Refinement

Key Decisions

The decisions that shaped the new system.

The most important decisions were not about individual screens. They were about how to make a complex licensing model understandable and manageable.

Solution

One system connecting the licensing experience.

The final solution transformed a licensing process distributed across multiple applications into a dedicated platform connecting the information and workflows needed by Nuix teams and customers. The deliverables included:

Outcome

From proposal to working product.

The redesigned licensing system moved beyond concept and into production. Approximately 90% of the proposed solution had been implemented before I left Nuix, with essentially the full product direction ultimately implemented. The platform remains in use. The project created a single product model for a licensing ecosystem that had previously been distributed across applications, processes and people’s knowledge.

Reflection

Clarity can be a product-design deliverable.

One of the biggest lessons I took from this project was that complex products sometimes need to be understood before they can be simplified. The most valuable design work wasn’t always a screen or prototype. Mapping the licensing ecosystem gave the team a shared language for discussing rules, dependencies and requirements. That understanding then informed the information architecture, workflows and interfaces that followed. Working closely with Product and Engineering also reinforced the value of involving design while requirements are still being shaped rather than waiting for them to be finalised. Understand the system. Make the complexity visible. Then design the experience.